SkyDrive, Google Docs, Office Live Workspaces - Compared (suspense music...)
How do these Cloud apps fare?
SkyDrive - Nice start. Good beginning. Nowhere near complete. Nowhere near ready for "primetime" either. I suggest waiting for more to happen in terms of improvements. You cannot move files between folders. There's no explorer-style tree-view navigation folder listing/panel either. No preview or meta tag editing. Limited recognition of file types. The shell is extremely basic and limited. Bare bones file storage, nothing fancy. It should be rolled into Office Live Workspaces or at least made to appear to be a subset or integral portion thereof. It's just logical.
Google Docs - The most fully-baked solution I've used, in terms of online authoring and collaboration. It still lacks basic change tracking features like you get with MS-Word. Revision control is very limited. It needs notification features. You can't import current document types like MS-Word 2007, Excel 2007, etc. You can't upload PDF files. The navigation UI is pretty reasonable and simple. Once you share a document, you can't unshare it with a particular user. You must copy it to a new name and delete the original. That sucks. Nice use of AJAX for right-click options and features. There's still too disconnected and isolated from other online services like Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Mail, etc.
Office Live Workspaces - The UI is already showing a lot of promise even though it's very young. No online authoring however. None. You have to use a client-side editor (or Live Writer) to create and edit content. The folder navigation and file management features are decent, but need more improvements to effectively extend beyond the desktop. It has no right-click features beyond basic browser defaults. It would be nice if they implemented some kind of AJAX right-click features like Google Docs. It is still too disconnected (logically and physically) from other online services like SkyDrive. I will say (while continuing to drive you crazy with my up/down review of this stuff) that adding a new workspace is simple, intuitive and works very well. I added a Household Workspace and edited my events list and contacts and that's where the AJAX-style features really shine. Nice job on that part.